As the chief lawyer for New York City, Michael Cardozo represents a client that is sued about 200 times a week. Now and then one of these suits really rankles him. His frustration was recently directed toward the federal Justice Department, which sued the city in May claiming that the fire department’s written tests have had a disparate impact on would-be minority firefighters.

“It’s such a misplaced use of federal resources, it’s outrageous,” Mr. Cardozo said during a recent interview. “We are talking about an attack on tests used in 1999 and 2002 that are no longer in use. If the purpose of a government suit is to try to correct something, what is this all about?”

Five years into the job, Mr. Cardozo is the second longest serving lawyer in city history to hold the position of corporation counsel, as the head of the city law department is called. The record belongs to a pince-nez wearing attorney named William C. Whitney.

The office has grown since Mr. Whitney’s tenure, which ran from 1875 to 1882. Today the corporation counsel oversees 665 lawyers, nearly a third of whom are devoted to the Sisyphean task of whittling away at what Mr. Cardozo calls “the tort problem”— which the city measured last year at 31,545 pending suits.

Mr. Cardozo, 65, is an energetic man who rarely sits still at a single task for more than two hours at a time. He says that around City Hall he is sometimes mistaken for another member of Mayor Bloomberg’s cabinet, Joel Klein, the schools chancellor, with whom he shares a legal background and a slight physical resemblance. Mr. Klein’s hair is curlier in the back, Mr. Cardozo said.

Mr. Cardozo’s talks in the dialect of appellate courts: he prefers brief, complete sentences, and never rambles.

“I have three jobs,” Mr. Cardozo said. “In no particular order, they are serving as a legal adviser to the mayor, running the third largest law firm in New York… and the cases, the matters.”

It is this last responsibility on which Mr. Cardozo’s public persona is built. The case that could define Mr. Cardozo’s tenure involves ailing rescuers and construction workers who say the city failed to protect them from toxins at ground zero.

“Some people are sick and angry,” Mr. Cardozo said. “But it doesn’t follow from that the city should pay.”

The city argues that it is immune from any liability, because it was responding to an emergency.

“I think Mike Cardozo has inherited a huge, insurmountable 9/11 tragedy,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs, David Worby, said.

Other cases to which Mr. Cardozo has recently devoted his attention include: suits brought by protesters arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention; a consent decree that limits police surveillance of political activity; suits by victims of the 2003 Staten Island ferry crash; as well as city-brought cases against out-of-state gun dealers.

It was Mr. Cardozo who chose in 2005 to appeal when a lower court judge ordered the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

“The mayor,” Mr. Cardozo said, “was very supportive of my decision” to appeal.

Critics of Mr. Cardozo say his defense of lawsuits against the city is sometimes overzealous. As an example, they point to his office’s legal strategy in defending lawsuits from victims of the ferry crash. Relying on an arcane maritime law, city lawyers tried to limit the amount of money the city would have to pay to the victims of the crash — which killed 11 and injured dozens of others — to the value of the ferry, about $14 million. A federal judge rejected that argument this year.

“He’s a good lawyer, no question about that,” a former high-ranking lawyer in the city law department who served through three mayors, Joel Berger, said. “I just wish he would be a better corporation counsel.”

A corporation counsel, Mr. Berger said, must count among his clients not only city officials, but the people of New York as well.

“People who sue the city are still citizens of this city and they deserve respect,” said Mr. Berger. “That includes people who lost legs in the Staten Island ferry incident.”

Replying to this vein of criticism, Mr. Cardozo said: “My job as I see it is to defend the city as best I can.”

He said he found arguments that the city should not litigate against victims — such as those injured in the ferry crash—to be “a little scary.”
“If we have a valid defense in any case, should I not assert it?” he said. “The law is the law. We are governed by law that benefits not just the plaintiffs but the defendants.”

Now and again, Mr. Cardozo will personally argue a court case, as he did in seeking penalties against the Transport Workers Union for the 2005 Christmas-time transit strike. In April he appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court — on which his great-grandfather’s cousin, Benjamin Cardozo, once sat — for the first time in his career.

In that case Mr. Cardozo sought to recoup property taxes from Mongolia and India, which own office buildings in New York City. When the arguments were over, Mr. Cardozo, who said he was pleased with the questions of the justices, did what many lawyers and non-lawyers alike do in front of One First Street. He had his picture snapped on the courthouse steps.

The corporation counsel job came to Mr. Cardozo unexpectedly. The head of Mr. Bloomberg’s transition team, Nathan Leventhal, asked Mr. Cardozo if he had any interest in the position. The two had been classmates at Columbia Law. Mr. Cardozo said he had never met Mayor Bloomberg until then.

Although Mr. Cardozo had served as the president of the city bar association, becoming a public servant was an unexpected turn for the lawyer who had spent more than three decades at Proskauer Rose LLP.

“If you had asked me 15 years ago what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life,” Mr. Cardozo said his response would have been: “It is clear I’m just going to be at Proskauer.”

At the firm, Mr. Cardozo specialized in sports law, along with another law school friend who worked there, David Stern, who became commissioner at the National Basketball Association. During much of his legal career, Mr. Cardozo was, he said, in the habit of opening a newspaper first to the sports pages, which he still reads, but only after the news. The last case Mr. Cardozo tried at Proskauer involved an anti-trust suit brought by players against Major League Soccer.

Mr. Cardozo has brought aspects of corporate law firm culture to the city law department. He now requires his lawyers to fill out time sheets documenting how they spend their hours. He estimated that he puts in between 2,200 and 2,300 hours a year.

“I take vacations, but I work pretty hard,” he said.